Speaking of NEBRASKA...

....I've been grousing about going to see Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, bitching & moaning because I know they'll take up valuable movie real estate with some bullshit romance nobody cares about and endless "here's Bruce having an epiphany and staring off into space as an event happening before his very eyes become lyrics" moments when I only want strict details about how he actually recorded the songs, the technical struggle it took to make the cassettes amenable to being played on vinyl, etc etc etc. Everybody I say this too looks at me like I'm crazy; meanwhile the one moment from the Get Back documentary people love to talk about more than anything else is when Paul pulled the song Get Back out of thin air while sitting there with a bored/hungover George & Ringo. It wasn’t some bullshit head in the clouds/magical mystical thing, it was an honest moment of clarity about how art presents itself, then going on to show us scene after scene of the band tirelessly working & re-working the song until they'd shaped it as they wanted and at no point was their some mystical "Paul looked out and saw the stars that said Tucson and it reminded him of some ancient Indian warrior he’d once dreamed that told him to get back to there you one belonged" etc etc etc bullshit.

So when I saw this article about Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, I was pleased to see this: 

Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is more of a why movie than a how movie, despite the fact that the how of Nebraska is its defining aspect. The man known for his band’s colossal, saxophone-blaring sound stripped away every bit of studio sheen and turned in a set of songs scored with a spooky, echoing acoustic guitar on a commercial cassette tape, captured on the kind of four-track recorder you could pick up at any commercial electronics store.

When Deliver Me From Nowhere plays Nebraska’s “Mansion on the Hill,” it shows us images of the young Bruce gazing longingly at a large house surrounded by acres of flowing grass: Get it? He’s the boy in the song! 

It just drives me crazy whenever a filmmaker picks a specific subject to make a movie about because they love that specific subject & know that many other people do as well, but then chickens out about actually showing whatever it was that drew them to that specific subject in the first place & instead of servicing the fellow super-fans they panic-fill half the movie with needless love interests/over-dramatic bullshit for the casual moviegoer in such a way that in the end it pleases neither the super-fan nor the casual moviegoer.

On a side note, the lyric "deliver me from nowhere" is from Livin' on the Edge of the World, an outtake from The River considered to be a precursor to the Nebraska song it ended up on, Open All Night.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), "doesn't this particular song have extra meaning to you as a Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce fan?"

Sigh. Yes it does, faithful readers, YES it does:

I wore the HELL outta Born in the USA (still have the cassette, too), but it never occurred to me to pick up anything else. Many, many years later my buddy Op gave me a mix tape of Bruce cuts (remember mix tapes?). I remember riding the Dog down to Charlottesville and I had it in my Walkman, kinda listening, not really paying attention etc and then a song called Livin On the Edge of the World came on. Blew, blew blew me away. And just like that, I was in love. After all those years, I was in. 

I also need to calm down, take a breath & just enjoy the movie while being 10000% grateful that somebody even thought of making a movie even remotely about the making of Nebraska.